Your business runs on IT. If your infrastructure goes down, so does your business. But implementing a reliable business continuity strategy can be time-consuming and expensive, requiring redundant infrastructure, complex planning, and expensive proprietary solutions. Because of this, many companies simply don't have actionable business continuity plans to protect their critical data and applications. Microsoft provides a variety of options for protecting both.

System Center’s Data Protection Manager protects your Microsoft workloads through its network backup architecture. You can use Microsoft Azure Backup for reliable offsite data protection, either alone in small environments or integrated with the System Center Data Protection Manager component in larger ones.

A variety of options can help reduce or eliminate planned and unplanned downtime for your applications, including traditional Windows Server Failover Clustering, Hyper-V live migration, and Hyper-V Replica. These capabilities can help maintain service availability and recover quickly from hardware failures.

Azure Site Recovery is a cost-effective disaster recovery solution which coordinates the replication and recovery of private clouds across sites, whether you're protecting dozens—or hundreds—of virtual machines. You can protect your applications to your own second site, a hoster's site, or even use Azure as your disaster recovery site (this feature is in preview).